This series weaves together elements of the murder mystery with self-portraiture, landscape, and travel snapshots. I am interested in the intersection of fine art and vernacular photography, our cultural fascinations with representations of the landscape and the female figure, and with the fictionalization of violence, crime, and death.
 

In the spring of 1998 I turned my camera on myself. Combining photography’s documentary nature with its conceptual possibilities, I began to juggle connotations of desire and fear, beauty and horror, voyeurism and objectification, unease and humor, to construct fictional sets for murder mysteries. I based this series loosely on Cindy Sherman’s Film Stills – but chose to create tableaux not to be read as moments just before or in the midst of a film-like narrative (as Sherman did) but always to be read as moments just after a narrative occurred. And I chose to heighten the absurdity of that narrative by portraying a myriad of unsolvable scenarios, the fictionalization of which is obviated by the recurrence of the same supposed dead body.
 

These photographs were made over the course of three years, particularly when I traveled throughout the southwestern United States. They contain elements of my life in that they include friends, people whom I met along my travels, and places where I vacationed. However, any reading into the identity of the characters is prevented both by the staged nature of the sets, and in particular the main character’s anonymity created by the costume of both her recurring cocktail dress and her recurring state of demise. I have intentionally heightened the interplay between fact and fiction in this series to call into question ways of viewing and interpreting photographic representations.
 

These photographs have been made with a view camera and are printed as silver gelatin prints.

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